Our guest this week is Dr. Brennan Spiegel, Director of Health Services Research for Cedars-Sinai Health System and Professor of Medicine and Public Health at UCLA. Dr. Spiegel joins us on the program for this first part in our series around Virtual Reality in Healthcare.

Dr. Spiegel directs the Cedars-Sinai Center for Outcomes Research and Education (CS-CORE), a multidisciplinary team that investigates how digital health technologies, including wearable biosensors, smartphone applications, virtual reality, and social media, can strengthen the patient-doctor bond, improve outcomes, and save money. CS-CORE unites clinicians, computer scientists, engineers, statisticians and health services researchers to invent, test, and implement digital innovations for the clinical trenches, always focusing on the value of technology to patient and provider end-users.

Dr. Spiegel has published numerous best-selling medical textbooks, editorials, and more than 160 articles in peer-reviewed journals. He is listed in the 2016 Onalytica "Top 100 Influencer" lists for digital health (#13) and virtual reality (#14). His digital health research has been featured by major media outlets, including NBC News, PBS, Forbes, Bloomberg, NPR, and Reuters.

In this episode, we discuss:

Dr. Spiegel’s background and how he came to develop an interest in VR

The work Dr. Spiegel is doing involving the patients;

The outcomes of this work and how patients have reacted

Why this kind of treatment works and what is going on in the brain that allows VR to be effective

The "spotlight attention theory"

The Moment of Cognitive Immersion and the Moment of Physiologic Immersion

How a doctor can know which is the best type of VR treatment and the ideal immersive scenario for an individual patient

The role of the “VR Pharmacy"

How VR Therapy can be cost effective and what can be measured in a value-based setting

What is next for VR in healthcare and what Dr. Spiegel sees happening in the next 1-2 years and in the next 10 years